Governor failing to protect the state’s natural treasure
The Adirondack Park Agency is weaker today than at any time in its 48-year history. That the fault rests with Gov. Andrew Cuomo is both unfortunate and surprising.
It’s unfortunate because the APA was created to protect the Adirondack Park from damaging use and development but is now falling down on the job. It’s surprising because New York’s governor has become a national leader
Dick Beamish of Saranac Lake served as the first communications director for the Adirondack Park Agency from 1972-78 and later launched Adirondack Explorer magazine.
in combating climate change, the greatest environmental threat to our planet in human history. Yet in a critically important way he has failed to protect the natural treasure in his own backyard.
First, some perspective. At 6 million acres, the Adirondack Park occupies one-fifth of New York. It is the largest park by far in the contiguous U.S. — nearly three times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It’s roughly the size of Vermont. The Adirondack Park is also unique in its ownership mix of public and private land: Almost half the park is Forest Preserve, protected by the state constitution as “forever wild” and owned by all New Yorkers.
Before the APA was established by the state Legislature, the private lands of the Adirondacks were wide open to any kind of development, posing a threat to the adjacent public lands and to the integrity of the park as a whole. Thanks to the APA’S regional development controls, enacted in 1973, and to the forever-wild Forest Preserve, which has enjoyed ironclad protection since 1895, the
Adirondack Park serves as a model for how people and nature can coexist in a mutually beneficial way.
Sadly, however, the APA has fallen into disrepair. This tiny but essential agency (50 staff members overseen by an 11-member board) has been crippled by a combination of interference and neglect by Cuomo. Indicative of this failure was the agency’s approval of a 6,000-acre subdivision near Tupper Lake that included dozens of “Great Camp lots,” ranging from 25 to 118 acres, with access roads and buildings that would be scattered across a forested landscape.
This was the largest subdivision proposal ever reviewed by the APA, and it represented a classic example of the wrong way to treat Adirondack land. The agency could have required the developer to avoid “rural sprawl” and preserve wildlife habitat by concentrating development so that most of the vast tract would remain in continuous open space.
The APA claimed it had no authority to do an ecological survey and require the necessary environmental protections. Yet when a “conservation design bill” was recently introduced in the Legislature, requiring the APA to exercise such control over large subdivision proposals, Cuomo and the agency itself failed to support the legislation. As a consequence, the bill went nowhere.
Worse yet is the plight of the APA’S governing board, which supposedly consists of three state-agency commissioners and eight citizen members appointed by the governor and subject to confirmation by the state Senate. The current number of citizen members has dwindled to five, four of whom are serving expired terms. Adding insult to injury, only two of them have any background in land use planning and environmental protection.
In May, the acting APA chairwoman resigned, having served eight months without being paid for the full-time work she was doing. In June, the Senate rejected a slate of four governor-sponsored candidates for the APA board because they lacked any expertise in environmental science, law, regional planning or open space protection — qualities essential to fulfilling the protective mission of the agency.
The Adirondack Park can accommodate plenty of wellplanned development in the years ahead and still avoid the perils of being loved to death. But we need enlightened leadership from the governor, and a strong, resolute Adirondack Park Agency, for this to happen.